Jack Conway was a science teacher, specializing in pre-history. He did a PowerPoint presentation on the abrupt appearance of new species at the beginning of the Cambrian, 543 million years ago, noting that this sudden appearance was unexplained, but that interesting theories abounded.

The actual reason for the sudden appearance of life in the Cambrian period was due to a family of intergalactic travelers that arrived on pre-historic Earth and released their aquatic pets into the planet's environment.

The name of this character appears to be an allusion to paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, who in 1979 named and described hallucegenia, one of the species described in the character's lecture. Harry Turtledove is an acquaintance of Morris.